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Monday, October 20, 2008

It is hard to believe that NetBeans is 10 years old. It seems like it was just yesterday that I switched from Sun Forte, Sun Studio Enterprise, and Sun Studio Creator to NetBeans. Don't get me wrong some of these IDEs were more polished at the time, and based on NetBeans in some cases. NetBeans just kept growing and the other IDEs fell by the wayside.

Why have multiple code bases? Sun made a good decision to focus on the community tool instead of wasting time on multiple code bases. It took time to get to this point though, but I think we can all agree it was a good decision.

I am participating in the NetBeans Decathalon. They wanted to know how I use NetBeans. Well as you can see from my blog... I use it on everything! On a serious note, I use NetBeans to develop enterprise class applications for my employer. It is a complete package from head to toe to accomplish this task. Most of my applications are JSF based interacting with JMS, EJBs, and Web Services. All of this on top of Project GlassFish.

My biggest project with NetBeans was using Visual JSF a.k.a Visual Web Pack (VWP) (Project Woodstock) to develop a timesheet tracking system which linked to our field force automation system and SAP.

This is also my favorite NetBeans story...

I decided to use VWP in NetBeans 5.0 to start the development. As more features were added to VWP, I kept upgrading. Eventually I was using 5.5 nightly builds along with Glassfish nightly builds. This became our production environment. NetBeans 6.0 nightly builds and GlassFish V1 Build 48. I just took Glassfish B48 out of production last week and replaced it with V2 UR2. This is a testament to how solid Glassfish is, and how useful NetBeans was in accomplishing my task.

I have been tasked to update this application by years end. I am waiting for NetBeans 6.5 to be released before I start. I am also waiting for some definitive word on Project Woodstock.